It was a bit of a rocky finish on our Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters Group Blogging Project. But here are some closing thoughts of mine.
As a father of soon-to-be two daughters, this book scared the crap out of me.
The challenge ahead is huge, particularly because our instantaneous, over-sexualized, materialistic culture seems to wage war against their sense of wholeness at every turn.
I don’t think most dads grasp just how powerful of an influence they are in the lives of their daughters. You really are heroes. You can be the most socially-awkward, boring, and lame excuse for a human being out there, and you’d still be a hero in the eyes of your daughter. At least that’s the starting point for all of us.
And even when they discover you’re just another fallen broken creature, there’s still some small space in their heart that reserves hope for the incredible man you can be.
Although I always thought I’d be the ‘good-cop’, I’m not. The book helped affirm to me that my daughters need me to be their dad, more than their best friend. This desire of “Am I worth fighting for?“, something I see even in my own wife, is built into our daughters.
They need to see the strength of our convictions even if at times it involves disciplining them. One of my favorite quotes was “When your two-year old daughter has a temper tantrum, put her in time-out and ignore her until she calms down. When she’s sixteen, do exactly the same.” (I’m still convinced I’ll be considered ‘cool’ when they’re sixteen at the moment though).
Some of the stories in the book were completely heart wrenching. You can be the best dad on the planet, and things can still happen. Our girls can break us into a million pieces and we still need to keep taking the hits, perusing, and loving. God may be love, but the reality is we’re one of they’re best tangible expressions of what love is.
It’s nice to know that every man that enters the lives of our daughters will be compared against us. It challenges me to be an even better man, and part me takes a bit of joy in my little girls crushing guys hearts because they aren’t half the man their geriatric daddy is. (at least that’s what I’m hoping for, because these girls aren’t just going to be loved, but completely adored).
I know there’s a challenging road ahead – but I so feel so utterly blessed to be a father of two girls. A final quote from the book, “A man can banter with his friends and colleagues about whether God exists. But a father looks at his daughter and knows.”
* You can see chapter-by-chapter posts on the book from many other fathers in the previous 10 or so posts.
I finished Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna about a month ago.
I can see why people say it’s a controversial book, though I really wasn’t all that shocked by the content at all. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
“If the church is following the life of God who indwells it, it will never produce those nonscriptural practices this book addresses.”
“Almost everything that is done in our contemporary churches has no basis in the Bible.”
“The stunning reality is that today’s sermon has no root in Scripture. Rather, it was borrowed from pagan culture, nursed and adopted into the Christian faith.”
“There is not a single verse in the entire New Testament that supports the existence of the modern-day pastor!”
“Nothing so hinders the fulfillment of God’s eternal purpose as does the present-day pastoral role.”
“Therefore, to our minds, these passages show that every Christian has the right to participate in ‘leading worship’ under Christ’s headship.”
“Giving a salary to pastors elevates them above the rest of God’s people. It creates a clerical caste that turns the living body of Christ into a business.”
“The one who plants a first-century-styled church leaves that church without a pastor, elders, a music leader, a Bible facilitator, or a Bible teacher… They will bring their own songs, they will write their own songs, they will minister out of what Christ has shown them–with no human leader present!”
If The Ooze hadn’t sent a copy of My Beautiful Idol to review, I probably would not have ever bothered reading it (a 300 page book with no pictures is a bit much for me these days).
But I’m glad I did. Everyone seems to be comparing Pete Gall’s book to Blue Like Jazz since it’s in the spiritual memoir genre. No offense to Donald Miller, but I thought ‘Idol’ was a far better read.
It could just be where I’m at in life right now, but I felt that Pete was just filled with way more self-absorption, more insecurity, more ridiculous stories, and more excuses in life than I’ve ever read about. Some reason stuff like that sells with me these days.
I don’t know how many times I stopped to say to myself, I can’t believe he just wrote that. And I also don’t know how his wife let him get away with writing about all these other women the way he did. With every girl he wrote about I kept flipping to his bio wondering, so is this his wife? …nope. His wife wasn’t even mentioned until the final closing paragraphs of the book. I’m hoping this sets things up for a follow up memoir.
It’s hard to bring up quotes from the book because it’s almost one giant narrative that rarely stops to explain itself. Here’s a few random tidbits…
Things you don’t even know about today are things that I’ll make sure you won’t be able to live without tomorrow
… and idol is a god you can put in your pocket. It’s something you can control, pull out when you need a dose of insurance or magic, and then put away while things click along well. Oh, and an idol will always choose your death over it’s own.
Seminaries are full of salespeople in training
My mother mentioned that she misses being able to brag about me…
We work so overly hard to make God look good that what we say has no credibility at all; we lie about him all the time.
…I want to earn God’s love because I can’t just let it happen without taking him for granted, or maybe I’d hate him if he loved me for no reason.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be quoting anything from the book again, but it’s definitely helped me to become a more honest follower of Jesus.
I just finished Anthony Weston’s “How to re-imagine the world”, a wild little book about reawakening radical imagination for social transformation.
Weston’s strengths are definitely in the realm of futuristic/ideation which completely jives with me.
He pitches a few ideas that are aching to be implemented like sports for the homeless, turning military bases into retreat centers, cutting the work week in half, preemptive peace, sun-baked roads that generate electricity, and creating floating cities to name a few.
Some quotes I highlighted from the book
Radical imagination begins with a move beyond complaint and resistance, beyond reactive tinkering or hunkering down or cynical accommodation. The first big move is to an alternative picture of how things could be instead.
Truly generative, inventive, new thinking requires risk-taking and is iteself a discipline. Mental stretching and twisting, conceptual self-provocations, going two steps too far – we need techniques, in short, to shock or seduce our ideas into unexpected and suggestive re-arrangements, freezing up space and generating raw material for the constructive imagination.
How can we make life more ecstatic?
Along with battling poverty we need to ask why we tolerate radical inequality at all. In many African tribal societies, even a single homeless person is felt as a disgrace by all. How did we get where we are?
We know too little of the natural world to come to love it.
Kirk douglas – I tell my sons they didn’t have my advantages growing up. I came from abject poverty. There was nowhere to go but up.
Muhammad Ali – The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
Sarah Silverman – Jesus’ words have become so perverted over time – it’s been like a game of telephone. If he existed, he would f*kin’ kill himself.
Carrie Fisher – Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
Christopher Reeve – Superman is a big fish in a small pond. If he’d grown up on Krypton… he might have been average.
Homer Simpson – Dear Lord, the gods have been good to me. As an offering, I present these milk and cookies. If you wish me to eat them instead, please give me no sign whatsoever … thy will be done. (munch munch munch)
On the church entering Babylonian Captivity… the Holy Spirit is no longer the driving force of the Church, Mammon is. Part of this captivity is the current obsession with hyper-activist, high adrenalin programs and methods and approaches, celebrated as saviors for a run-down system.
The current average cost for Christian evangelism and missions is $330,000 for every newly baptized person.
We have stolen the church from God, and he wants it back from us thieves.
God wants a veil-less church without pulpits and clergy-laity distinctions. A pastor, no matter how godly he conducts himself, actually stands more in the way of this than he is of help, because he has become a symbol of that very discrepancy.
* I had read the pre-release edition – The book will be available officially in June 2008.
It was a bit of a rocky finish on our Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters Group Blogging Project. But here are some closing thoughts of mine.
I finished 
I just finished Anthony Weston’s “How to re-imagine the world”, a wild little book about reawakening radical imagination for social transformation.
